Almond Rhubarb Cake

I took a plum cake from David Tanis's A Platter of Figs, which I have out from the library, and replaced the plums with rhubarb. I also added some extra sugar to compensate for the rhubarb, which was a good thing, because it still came out pretty sour. The cake was nutty and wholesome, more like a breakfast pastry than a dessert (but good for dessert too!). I'll give a very abbreviated version to encourage you to check out the original cookbook.

• 1 cup unblanched almonds
• 1/2 cup sugar, plus 1/3 cup for topping
• 1/3 cup flour
• dash of salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 4 tbs. melted butter
• 2 pounds rhubarb

Grind the almonds and 1/2 cup sugar in a food processor, and combine with the flour and salt. Beat the eggs, milk, and butter together. Combine with the dry ingredients and put in a buttered, 10-inch cake pan. Top with thickly sliced rhubarb (more than one layer is okay if they won't fit) and the extra sugar and bake at 350 degrees. The recipe says to cook for 40-45 minutes, but the rhubarb adds a lot of liquid, and I had to mine took longer.

A halved recipe, cooked in a cast iron pan.

Cookies

Here are some of the cookies of Christmas.

In order, they're chocolate espresso cookies, mint meringues, krumkake, sugar cookies, sugary chocolate cookies, and benne wafers. Lindsay and I made the sugar cookies, the sugary chocolate cookies, and the benne wafers, and along with her brother Zach we made the meringues. Lindsay's mother Kim made the espresso cookies, and her grandmother Viv made the krumkake. All were delicious. We made some more benne wafers for New Year's, but they're getting soggy, either because of the Seattle dampness or because we used dark brown sugar instead of light brown sugar. They're still pretty good, even if they melt instead of crunch in your mouth.

Apartment in Order and Apricot Sorbet

It's hard to make an apartment look neat in pictures! (Or in person, for that matter.)

I thought our place was looking tidy, but what I notice first in this picture is the precarious pillow. What I notice second is the cables. Last I see all the things I like about our apartment, like the vast windows and the staircase behind our kitchen table.

Our bedroom comes off a little bit better:

My favorite part of the apartment is the kitchen, which Lindsay and I have kept busy improving. If you look out the door in the bedroom picture, you can see a spice rack that we put up. This picture is what you see if you walk out that door and turn right:

This is what we've been eating for dessert lately:

Lindsay made the cake. It's a perfectly executed Reine de Saba cake from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The stuff on the side is an apricot sorbet that I adapted from a Martha Stewart recipe for cherry ice. I traded apricots for cherries, roasted them, and put the whole thing in an ice cream maker. Here's the recipe.

• 2 pounds apricots
• juice from 1/4 lime
• 1/4 cup and 2 tbs. honey
• 1/2 cup white wine

Tear each apricot in half (along the seam, of course!) and lay them in a single layer in a roasting pan, torn side up. Put them in a 450 degree oven for 15-20 minutes, until they start to brown in spots. Remove them, let them cool a bit, and turn them into mush by whatever method suits your fancy. I used an immersion blender, but even a potato masher should do a decent job. Add the remaining ingredients and taste. You might need to add more honey. Remember that it will be less sweet when you freeze it, and so it should really taste sweeter than you think is right. Let it cool off for a few hours in the fridge, or for thirty minutes in the freezer if you're really impatient like I was, and freeze in a quart-sized ice cream maker. It's soft but still great after this, and after an hour in the freezer it will really be terrific. It stays reasonably soft in the freezer, probably due to all the wine in it.

Use for Stale Bagels

This is a weird little dessert that I put together when I had some giant, stale poppy bagels. It's a bread pudding, spiffed up with some nuts and spices and the poppy seeds from the bagels. If your bagels aren't giant ones from New York, you might need to use two. Even though the quantities in here sound small, it should be plenty for four people.

• 1 1/2 stale poppy bagels (or 1 bagel plus some bread, or something similar)
• 1 1/2 cups milk or half-and-half
• 2 tbs. butter and some for greasing the pan
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. garam masala or similar spice mixture
• 1/4 cup sugar, plus an extra spoonful
• pinch salt
• 2 tbs. rum
• 1/4 cup walnuts, toasted and then ground roughly (use a food processor)
• 1/4 cup shelled salted pistachios
• 1/4 cup halvah, chopped into walnut-sized bits (not really essential)

Heat your oven to 325 degrees and grease a small casserole dish or cake pan with butter. Tear the bagels up into pieces; these should be about the size of grapes, but it's nice to have some variation to get a range of textures. Put these in the casserole dish with the halvah and pistachios. Heat up the milk, rum, butter, cinnamon, garam masala, salt, and the 1/4 cup sugar just until the butter is melted. Pour this over the bagels into the casserole dish. Sprinkle the ground walnuts on top, and then sprinkle a spoonful of sugar on top of this. Bake until a knife put in at the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes to an hour.